


Milk and Sugar

by Reading Redhead (readingredhead)



Category: Young Wizards - Duane
Genre: Community: comment_fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-25
Updated: 2010-05-25
Packaged: 2017-10-09 17:14:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/89756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readingredhead/pseuds/Reading%20Redhead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom can't drink coffee as strong as Carl likes it, but he makes it for him anyway. Short, sweet, fluff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Milk and Sugar

At first, the tea started out as a focus thing. One of Tom's high school teachers had been into educational psychology and had shared with their math class that peppermint enhanced memory storage and retrieval. Eager to do anything that would help him survive calculus, Tom had taken to making himself a cup of peppermint tea every afternoon while he worked through his math homework. If it had helped him out with the math at all, his grade didn't reflect it, but by the time he started college it didn't matter; the tea-drinking became part of his thinking process, and migrated over into the realm of his writing, so that all he needed to help him focus on work at the end of a long day was a nice cup of something herbal with just a hint of sugar.

The first time he goes out with Carl – well, not quite in that way, but later on they'll both count it as the start because it's the first time they go somewhere without a pretext – it's to a small café a few blocks from NYU, an old favorite of Carl's because they're the only ones who brew coffee strong enough for him. Tom orders tea and Carl raises an eyebrow. "What," Tom asks, "is this a significant incompatibility?"

"Perhaps," Carl says, and Tom smiles, and thinks nothing of it, because although he's a wizard, he can't tell the future, and he certainly doesn't know how much acidic coffee there is in his.

Later, Tom learns to drink and even enjoy coffee, but he never drinks the stuff he makes in his own kitchen, where it's always brewed to Carl's standards, no matter which of them stumbles out of bed first in the morning to make it. He's been teased about it in the past – "Let me get this straight," his friends say, "you brew coffee you can't even stand to drink?" – but Tom just smiles and tells them it's part of the bargain. Ten years after that first shared "teatime," Carl steeps Tom's tea just how he likes it as a matter of course, the same way Tom makes sure there's always a thermos of steaming hot coffee ready to accompany Carl to work each morning.


End file.
